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About Bob Higgins

Bob Higgins Lifelong liberal of the Tom Paine wing. Marine Vietnam vet. Have worked as a photographer, cab driver, bartender, carpenter, cabinetmaker, writer and editor. Now retired on a Veterans Disability program I spend my time writing, and complaining about politics and the environment.

The reports come at us every month, from the Gulf, Alaska, the North Sea, small towns in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania and from the Yellowstone River. There is no place on earth that these greaseheads will not despoil and are not actively and zealously engaged in destroying. Make a note that these are only the events that get reported or otherwise discovered

It's 4AM on Saturday and I'm up early. When you cant go back to sleep in the 21st century you turn the on computer, then the news.
According to NOAA, and verified visually on Google Earth, Hurricane Irene is centered at 33.7N and 77.5W which puts it in position to munch Beaufort, North Carolina just a degree or so north and west at 4°43′15″N 76°39′9″W according to Wikipedia

I sometimes think that many of us have a deep seated mania that causes us to believe that for any substance to be an effective source of energy it must be something that can be burned. Not only must it be combustible, the substance must be hard to get. This manic belief requires that the energy source must be searched out and dug up or clawed from the earth at great trouble and expense.
What's more, to be a credible source the fuel must be retrieved from the bowels of the earth or the deepest depths of the ocean by intrepid explorers with fedoras and a five day growth of manly stubble, all else is considered to be alchemy

Reading "Looking for Gas in All the Wrong Places" a piece in Monday's NYT by Stanley Fish I found a calm, collected, depiction of an equally calm and collected town meeting in Andes, N.Y. where the subject on the agenda was "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits.
Calm, rational, and civil aren't normally descriptive of a gathering when fracking, the subject that is bitterly dividing communities from North Texas and Colorado to Pennsylvania, and from West Virginia to New York is under discussion. Fracking is a national and local hot potato

There are about 4000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact I bumped into while researching an article on BP's Macondo field Deepwater Horizon disaster last year.
In addition, there are more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that dot the Gulf, actually it's much more like a blanket.
This morning I ran across a map and a video by tsinn at The Sword Press in which he plots these wells by time and position as well as location as in the NOAA map above

There's not a lot of information coming out of Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) or the Japanese government regarding the severity of the ongoing meltdown at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear facility.
What we are getting is alarming and according to an Al Jazeera story yesterday Japanese scientists and doctors are sounding the alarm

Coal provides jobs. The jobs are dirty, they produce a product that's harmful to the planet, hazardous to the health and welfare of the workers and their neighbors, but... hey, they're jobs.
Besides, some of those jobs involve improving our mountains. They blow the tops off them, and haul away the coal, leaving flat tops, suitable for landing pads, parking lots, Nascar racing, or Appalachian soccer matches

Another oil spill, the worst in the North Sea in a decade according to several media sources. I didn't bother to call Donald Trump when news of Shell's North Sea oil spill broke on this side of the pond. He's not taking my calls.
I would have asked him if he found it ironic that a week after publicly berating Scotland for wanting to site a wind farm off the coast of his golf development near Aberdeen, Shell dumped more than 55,000 gallons of oil into the North Sea out beyond where the wind farm would stand

We are a civilization that ignores or glosses over its past mistakes, the horrors of its history and seems blissfully oblivious to all the terrible dangers that surround us in the present. With all the conflict and war, rapid population growth, dwindling supplies of resources, from water, to food, to energy, and the steadily warming temperature of the atmospheric stew we're all simmering in, I'm amazed that anyone believes we will have descendents at all beyond a century or two

For years, in truth until this morning, I would have said that the rotation of the radiometer's vanes was caused by the pressure differential of the photons reflecting or being absorbed by the dark or light colored vanes. I was wrong, then and now

I've just been notified by one of my senators, I have two, that the administration has announced a hike in CAFE standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. I heard the news several day ago but most of us have better sources than the Senate. I had to sit down for a minute to let that shocking information sink in. I wondered for a second or two why they went for the fraction, what was it about the last 2640 feet per gallon that so tested their courage or was so beyond the range of their vision that they didn't simply roll all the way to 55 mpg

Yesterday a young man named Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison for impeding the process of granting federal oil leases at nearly two dozen sites in close proximity to Arches and Canyonlands, both pristine and protected areas

If we have learned nothing from the mayhem of the last century with its constant conflict over resources, its terrible wars, droughts, famines, epidemics and economic depressions we should have learned that more people at the party will not reduce the noise level and no amount of religious or ideological wishful thinking will make it so

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